This comprehensive reference book describes more than 500 Belgian entrepreneurs and financers active between 1830 and 1980 regarding their family background, social status, education, business career, political functions, cultural activities, business networks and interests. Included are descriptions of notable business families. An example is the Solvay family, described in 6 pages including biographical entries of Ernest, Alfred and Armand Solvay.

In many cases these Belgian captains of industry founded companies all over the world. That makes this work a "not only for Belgians" book. The book concludes with a +40 page long mixed index on company and person name. The reverse lookup of a company name can be interesting as it yields one or more entries in the dictionary. Also here an example : the Tramways de Szegedin, which operated in Hungary, is mentioned with the entries of two bankers, namely Léon Cassel and David Van Buuren.

The book contains many images, mostly portraits, but also ads, photographs and a handful of letterheads and share certifates as well.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Japanese stock certificates are known for their elegant designs. Produced as colorful high quality prints, these securities often show little masterpieces. A tempting theme to collect. For classification purposes, besides the name of the paper's issuer you also need to know the certificate's issue date. Many of us however are not familiar with the Japanese language and writing system. In this post, I'll show you how you can recognize and read dates on your Japanese shares.

The combination of each one of these skills seems to make the task tough. But each step is easy to learn. Stay with me all the way down. I'll guide you step by step through the process. At the end of this post I will congratulate you because you will have mastered a new skill : reading Japanese dates !

明 治 元 年

first year of the Meiji reign : 1868

The year, month and day characters in the common date format

The date 2014年04月30日 is written in the modern commonly used date format. It stands for April 30, 2014. The example shows that, together with Hindu-Arabic numerals, also Japanese characters are used. These characters stand for year, month and day, and it is important you can recognize them :

year : 年

month of year : 月

day of month :日

In Japanese, the combination of this charachters form the word 年月日 'date'.

How to read Japanese numbers

You can write numbers in Japanese in two ways: with Hindu-Arabic numerals (1, 2, ..) , as in the date example above, or with Chinese numerals ( 一, 二 , ...). Guess what : old Japanese shares use the Chinese numerals for indicating the year, the month of the year and the day of the month. The table below shows the numbers 1 to 10. Look at the first two columns and for the moment just ignore the last two columns.

double-click image to enlarge

As you notice, in Japanese, there is a special character for the number 10 (and also for 100, 1000, et cetera). Watch out now, to form a Japanese number larger than ten you need to apply the following rule :

The common date format is not used on Japanese stocks and bonds, except for some recent certificates. In Japan, other date systems exist and the one we need is the nengō date system( 'nen' or 年means year). It is the official system for dating years used in virtually all government and private business.

Historically, Japanese dates were expressed as years of a named era called a nengō. The system was introduced from China around the 7th century. With the advent of modern Japan under the emperor Meiji, the eras have been tied to the reign of the current emperor since 1868. When emperor Hirohito ascended the throne on 25 Dec 1926, he chose the name Shōwa for his reign title. Therefore 1926 was the first year of Shōwa. Shōwa 2 represents 1927 and so on. Here is an overview of the modern eras :

Meiji era, characters : 明 治 , first year of reign : 1868

Taishō era, characters : 大 正 , first year of reign : 1912

Shōwa era, characters : 昭 和 , first year of reign : 1926

Heisei era, characters : 平 成 , first year of reign : 1989

It is important that you can recognize these era names.

In Japanese writing, a specific nengō year starts with the emperor's era name followed by the year of the emperor's reign and ends with the year character 年. Two examples:

昭 和 三 十 六 年 is Shōwa 36 (3x10+6), the 36th year in the Shōwa reign

大 正 十 五 年 is Taishō 15 (10+5), the 15th year in the Taishō reign

For indicating the first year of reign, the "first" character 元 is used.
So, 明 治 元 年 indicates the first year in the Meiji reign, which corresponds to 1868.

Trinitron and Bravia televisions, Betamax videocassettes, Walkman and Discman, Handycam, Vaio laptops and Playstation consoles. Sony was founded as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Corporation (Totsuko) in 1946. In 1955 Sony was chosen as the new brand name derived from the Latin "Sonus" (sonic) and the American "Sonny", a term used to call a boy or young man in a familiar way. The first Sony-branded product, the TR-55 transistor radio, appeared in 1955. The name Sony was easy to pronounce everywhere in the world. The company name was changed into Sony in 1958. At the time, it was rarely seen that a Japanese company used Roman letters to spell its name instead of the traditional Kanji characters.